Jaffa Cupcakes

I do enjoy a jaffa cake or two (although it's been a while since I bought any) and the chocolate orange flavour combo is generally a successful one. I decided to combine the flavours by using a chocolate cupcake base, marmalade to add orange, chocolate buttercream flavoured with orange extract and then topped with a mini jaffa cake.

The cupcake recipe is my adaptation of the Hummingbird Bakery's recipe - I've altered the quantities to give me 12 reasonable sized cakes instead of 12 tiny ones. 

Jaffa Cupcakes

Ingredients

150g plain flour

30g cocoa powder

200g sugar

2tsp baking powder

60g unsalted butter

200ml milk (I used semi skimmed)

1 large egg

pinch salt

1tsp vanilla extract

For the buttercream (and as I'm typing this I realise I can't actually remember how I made the buttercream, but if I were to do it again these are the quantities I'd try)

90g unsalted butter, softened

75g dark chocolate, melted and cooled (see later comments)

140g icing sugar

1tsp orange extract

For filling and decoration

Marmalade (I used Tiptree's Orange and Tangerine - it's not as bitter as some marmalades)

Mini Jaffa cakes

Chocolate sprinkles if desired

Method

- Preheat the oven to 170C. Place 12 paper cases in a muffin tin.

- Combine the flour, cocoa powder, sugar, baking powder and butter in a mixer and blend. The mixture will not form any kind of coherent mass, but the butter should look fairly distributed rather than huge lumps.

- Add the egg, milk and vanilla extract and beat well until combined.

- Divide between cases and bake for 18-20 minutes until a cake tester comes out clean.

- Allow to cool.

- When cool, cut a cone out of the cake (this is more difficult than with some other cake recipes as the crumb is so soft), blob a little marmalade into each hole and replace the top of the cake you cut out. See photo above - coincidentally this is why you don't usually get in-process shots from me - I'm usually doing this late at night and the light is truly rubbish. Apologies!

- For the buttercream - firstly melt the chocolate and allow to cool - this is slightly tricky because you want it cool enough to not melt the butter in the buttercream, yet warm enough to avoid it recrystallising into lumps. I learnt the hard way that my chocolate was too cool.

- Beat the butter and sugar until very light and fluffy, add the chocolate and orange extract and continue to beat. If the mixture is too stiff to pipe easily add a little hot water (from a kettle).

- Pipe onto the cupcakes, taking care not to dislodge the lid of the marmalade.

- Add a mini Jaffa cake and sprinkles if you want.

This chocolate cake recipe is really, really soft and light. It's quite sweet and structurally very delicate - perhaps not the most robust container for the marmalade but delicious anyway. The combination of soft chocolate cake, slightly tart, bitter marmalade and sweet orange scented buttercream was gorgeous and these were really popular at work. I'll definitely make this recipe for chocolate cupcakes again - they're so soft and moist!

Exhibit number one - cupcakes piped with a blocked star shaped tip. I was trying to use a Wilton 2D here, and the cupcake on the right is fairly ok. As I mentioned earlier, I found out to my cost that my chocolate was too cool - it has formed micro-blobs of chocolate in the buttercream mixture, making it impossible to pipe. The cupcake on the left shows what happens to your pretty rose when the tip is blocked - a bit of a mess. Hence the smooth-piped look in the rest of the post. I usually avoid this and especially with chocolate buttercream, but actually with the mini Jaffa cake it looks quite acceptable!

Ignoring the holes in the buttercream if you look directly at the centre of the picture above you can see a darker bit - that's one of the (many) bits of chocolate to clog the nozzle...

Squidgy Chocolate Orange Cake

Hmm, apparently my ability to take photos of brown squares of cakes hasn't improved yet...

This is the perfect cake to have in your repertoire - it's so, so easy to put together and quick to bake but the flavour and texture are just divine. I have made it a number of times before, but have tweaked slightly to suit my taste. The original recipe is from Nigella Lawson and it's the Storecupboard Chocolate Orange Cake in How to be a Domestic Goddess. It is also a very adaptable recipe - Nigella herself uses exactly the same ingredients in her Chocolate Cherry Cupcakes in the same book (swapping cherry jam for marmalade), so if you're wondering whether the recipe works as cupcakes, it does. (I have tried this out too, and the cupcakes are very good!)

When I have made it in the past I followed the instructions to use an 8"/20cm round springform tin and always found it needed slightly longer than the specified 50 minutes to bake and it tended to catch and overbrown slightly around the edges before the middle was done. I've made it in an 8"/20cm square tin and after 40-45 minutes it's perfectly cooked around the edges and in the middle - win/win.

The quality of the marmalade is important in the cake. I know that sounds like a silly thing to say because of course it will be - the marmalade is a key ingredient. From experience I know that using too bitter a marmalade will not be very pleasant - even though there is a lot of sugar in the recipe, the bitterness still comes through. This time, I had a jar of marmalade that I had used for a couple of other cakes where I had wanted that bitterness, and had found this particular jar sadly lacking. However it struck me as perfect for this cake, where I don't think you actually want a particularly bitter marmalade. I did want to make sure that the orange flavour was there though and added some of my latest favourite - orange extract (I bought mine from Lakeland - a dangerous place to shop...). This really boosts the orange without any bitterness.

Another brown square...

Squidgy Chocolate Orange Cake
Ingredients
120g butter
100g dark chocolate, roughly broken (I used Green and Blacks 85% cocoa)
245g orange marmalade (I used Bonne Maman Mandarin marmalade)
150g caster sugar
1tsp orange extract
2 large eggs
150g self raising flour

Method (this is truly simple!)
- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line an 8"/20cm square shallow tin.
- Melt the butter over a low heat and when it is melted add the broken chocolate. Stir until melted.
- Add the marmalade, sugar and extract and stir until well amalgamated.

- Add the eggs, beating them into the mixture until well combined and then add the flour, folding it through to make sure you don't have any unmixed bits.

- Pour into the prepared tin and bake for 40-45 minutes.
- Remove from tin and allow to cool, or eat hot as a pudding with icecream.

I love this cake - it's moist and fudgy and on the start of the cake to brownie scale - at the cake end but with a slightly brownie-like texture due to the high sugar content. The peel in this marmalade is quite fine and soft - I missed the chewy texture of the peel in the more bitter marmalades I've used in the past, but I didn't miss the overall bitterness that too strong a marmalade can give. Adding the orange extract worked well here to boost the orange flavour, as I knew the marmalade didn't have enough punch. This is perfect for an indulgent treat during Chocolate Week.

This would be a great family recipe to make with little ones. The melt and mix method is easy for little hands and the chocolate orange flavour is great for children too - especially if you do what I did and use a relatively mild-flavoured marmalade and boost the flavour with orange extract. This avoids any unwanted bitterness. It's also perfect for harrassed mums who are having dessert demanded of them but haven't got time to think what to make - perfect with custard or icecream. Any leftovers are perfect as a gettting home from school treat. I really hope you make and enjoy this cake - it's one of my perennial favourites!

Cardamom and Orange Banana Bread

And following on from the spectacular fail that was my attempt at Chelsea Buns, we'll move onto something altogether more successful.

I spotted this recipe a while back in the February 2012 issue of BBC Olive magazine in a feature on cooking with oranges and lemons, and really fancied making it as an alternative to the other banana bread recipes I've tried in the past. The recipe can be found here, and I made a few small changes to it. I somehow thought that I had run out of light muscovado sugar, with only about 80g left in the packet. I was sure I had some more, somewhere, but in the disorganisation of my kitchen I couldn't find it and so decided to substitute the remaining amount of sugar with equal quantities of dark muscovado and normal caster sugar (so that the treacly dark muscovado didn't take over the flavour of the cake). This worked fine, and added a treacly depth of flavour to the finished cake. I found the other packet of light muscovado sugar as soon as the cake was in the oven....

I didn't bother with the candied orange to sit atop the cake - I'm not all that bothered by decoration of that sort and worry that the decoration will sink into the cake. I wanted a success, not a failure! Besides, I love a loaf cake with a beautiful crack down the centre. Instead of using cardamom pods and crushing the seeds, I used a scant 1/4 tsp of ground cardamom, only had two ripe bananas rather than the specified three, and missed out the walnuts altogether. Hmm, perhaps these weren't only minor changes! Never mind, they didn't affect the outcome of the adventure, and the resulting cake was excellent.

I really liked the combination of flavours - the orange, cardamom and the dark sugar all blended together really successfully. The cake wasn't too moist or heavy, as can sometimes be the case with banana loaves (possibly because I didn't put as much banana in it!) but it was still lovely and moist and a great cake to take to work, being perfect for a break with tea. It rose well, and was quite tender - the slices were apt to break if handled too roughly, but since the cake didn't last long, this wasn't a problem! Might try adding a bit of chocolate next time. I think chocolate and cardamom are supposed to be a good flavour combo....

Peaches and Cream Upside-Down Cake

Actually, that's a blatant lie. There are no peaches in this cake at all, it's just that there were supposed to be, and 'peaches and cream' somehow sounds better than 'apricots and cream'. Or it does to me anyway.

Right, I'll stop rambling about the relative merits of the names of stone fruits when combined with the word 'cream' and tell you more about this rather attractive and delicious cake. I was lucky enough to receive many lovely presents over Christmas (was that really only a month ago? - it seems a lifetime ago now!) but not a single cookery book. I'm not complaining in the slightest. I think my family have (rightly) given up buying me cookery books because they assume that I will probably already own them. This is a pretty safe assumption, because when publishers release their 'Christmas' (it feels so, so wrong to be talking about Christmas in January!) crop of cookery books around September time, I am powerless to resist buying them for even a few weeks, let alone wait months for Christmas to come. So it's pretty inevitable that I have already aquired the books I'm interested in by the time Christmas rolls around.

Where is this leading? Well, Random Recipes is where! This month's theme is 'New Year, New Book'. Shortly after Christmas I found myself in a book shop.... and shortly after that I found myself a few pounds poorer and a cookery book richer. The book in question was Edd Kimber's 'The Boy Who Bakes'. For those not already aware, Edd was the winner of the first series of the Great British Bake Off (much enjoyed by me, and millions of others!). He blogs over at The Boy Who Bakes so head over to see some of his recipes.

My random recipe from this book was the aforementioned Peaches and Cream Upside-Down cake. Edd says this would be a lovely recipe for a summer afternoon, and I'm sure it would, but with only minor tweaks it was a lovely recipe for a wet January day too. Edd's tip at the bottom of the recipe is that you can make the recipe yours by using all sorts of different fruit. In my cake I decided to use apricots. Now, apricots are just as much out of season round these parts as peaches, but I used tinned apricots. This may sound slightly over the top, but using tinned apricots was a revelation. Tinned peaches really don't have very much flavour at all (although I do actually happen to quite enjoy them!) but apricots seem to fare much better when tinned.

So how did it go and how did it taste?

The recipe calls for the grated zest of an orange, and I was worried that this would completely overpower the fruit, but actually it was one of those wonderful occasions where the flavours were complementary and more than the sum of their parts, which I really hadn't expected. Because I had such a large orange, I did only use the zest of half and felt that this was just right. I used one 400g tin of apricots, drained, in place of the specified peaches.

The cream of the recipe name is in the form of soured cream in the batter, which adds a beautiful richness to the cake, to contrast with the freshness of the fruit flavours. There is also a caramel topping, but once again I am reminded that I must either invest in a solid tin, or some all-in-one liners, because the majority of the caramel escaped from my tin. Luckily I had anticipated this and covered the outside of the tin with foil to catch the sticky juices.

My cake took rather longer than the specified 55 minutes to bake (I probably gave it an extra 15-20 mins covered with foil) but it was well worth the wait. I was so pleased with the way the apricots looked arranged on the top of the cake - it reminded me of the rays of the sun, and was just what I needed on a dull January day to remind me that the sun still exists, even if hidden for now. A really lovely cake, a worthy submission to Dom's challenge and I'm looking forward to making more of the recipes in the book.

Clementine shortbread

The skies may be grey and rain falling by the bucketload where I am, but at least the middle of winter brings bright colourful relief with the citrus fruit season. We now have beautiful lemons and oranges, satsumas, tangerines and the lovely clementines I used to make these shortbread, and hopefully the blood orange season is just round the corner. I adore blood oranges, for the novelty of the colour, but the flavour is superb too, nicer than ordinary oranges in my opinion.

This recipe comes from the wonderful 'Cakes' book in the River Cottage series, written by Pam Corbin (and slightly modified by me). Thanks Pam!

Clementine shortbread - makes lots!
Ingredients
150g unsalted buter, cut into small pieces, softened
75g caster sugar
150g plain flour
75g cornflour
zest 1 clementine

Selection of cutters (I used my new star shaped ones)

Method

- Preheat the oven to 170C/Gas 3.

- Beat the butter until softened. Work in the sugar until well mixed.

- Sift in the flour and cornflour, then add the clementine zest and mix until smooth - keep going, it will all come together although it doesn't feel like it will. You can use your hands to gently bring the dough together - try and knead it as lightly and as little as possible.

- Lightly flour the surface and roll out the dough, I wanted fairly thick biscuits, so didn't roll too thinly.

- Cut out biscuits with cutters of your choice, or just cut into pieces with a knife if you have no cutters!

- Bake for around 20 minutes until very lightly coloured - I think mine needed a little longer to get to a stage of done-ness I was happy with, but be careful not to colour them too much.

- Allow to cool on a wire rack.

The shortbread will apparently keep for up to four weeks in an airtight container - if you can resist it for that long!

They are beautifully crumbly, tender biscuits. The clementine is quite subtle - you get the flavour of the clementine straightaway and then the buttery shortbread takes over - yum! I think I could definitely add more zest next time for a stronger flavour. This would be a very good recipe to have in the 'basics' repertoire. Very successful!

I'm submitting these to the #citruslove event being co-hosted by Baking Addict at The more than occasional baker, check it out here.

Cream cheese chocolate orange cake - We Should Cocoa

After last month's apple chocolate challenge, this month Choclette has been kind to us and given us orange to pair with chocolate, a classic combo. Chocolate and orange work so well together that this month the challenge has been to come up with something different. Well, I haven't really done something different, but I have made a really rather good cake, and that should be counted a successful challenge I think!

It came about as I found I had half a tub of cream cheese in the fridge with no immediate plans. Trawling round I found that I had made a cake containing cream cheese relatively recently. It was a good cake and deserved another outing, but in a modified form.

This is based (heavily) on Dan Lepard's Ginger chocolate chip pound cake, modified to suit my requirements.

Cream Cheese Chocolate Orange Cake
Ingredients
100g unsalted butter, melted
200g caster sugar
125g full fat cream cheese
3 medium eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
220g plain flour
30g cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
100g dark chocolate, chopped,
grated zest of one large orange

Chocolate fudge frosting
100g dark chocolate, chopped
50g unsalted butter
1 rounded tbsp golden syrup

Sprinkles to decorate

Method

- Preheat the oven to Gas4/180C. Grease and line an 8"/20cm square cake tin.

- Mix together the butter and caster sugar. While the butter is still warm, beat in the cream cheese. This was really satisfying, and gave a beautifully creamy, glossy mixture.

- Beat in the eggs one at a time until combined then add the vanilla and orange zest.

- Sift in the flour and cocoa powder and beat until combined.

- Stir in the chocolate chips.

- Spoon into the tin and bake for 40-45 minutes until a skewer/cake tester comes out clean or with only a few crumbs remaining.

- Leave to cool on a wire rack and in the meantime, make the frosting.

- Melt the butter, chocolate and golden syrup over a pan of hot water.

- Allow to cool until spreading consistency, this will take a couple of hours.

- Spread the frosting over the cake and sprinkle with decorations as desired.

My cake took 45 minutes to bake, and then I partially covered it with foil and gave it another 5 mins or so to finish cooking the centre.

This was a lovely cake and the orange flavour came through really well without being overpowering or artificial, which is something I sometimes find with orange flavoured chocolate items.

It was a little dry though, and would probably have been better eaten with either a big blob of vanilla ice cream, or some pouring cream as a dessert, or perhaps even better than both of those, with some orange flavoured custard - hot enough to make the topping go all gooey. Mmmm, yum! However, there were no complaints, and it disappeared rapidly enough when taken in to work!

'Spruced' up Vanilla Cake - Forever Nigella

I was wondering what I could make to use my star shaped mould (well, I need to use it when I can, and Christmas is definitely that time!) and looked back through my archives to see what I had done with it last time. You can see the results here.

Because it was so successful, I decided to repeat the cake pretty much the same as last time. It then occurred to me that with a Nigella recipe in a Nigella-esque type cake tin, and with it fitting the Christmas theme, this would be perfect to enter Forever Nigella this month, hosted by Sarah from the lovely Maison Cupcake blog. The theme this month is Christmas Presence, and you can find the announcement post with rules and so forth here. Sarah has also promised that Forever Nigella will be making a reappearance in the new year in a new format - looking forward to finding out what that might be!

I have made some changes to the recipe, and will write out what I did in my own words, so hopefully not contravening the challenge rules. You can also find the recipe here, on the BBC Food website, or here on Nigella's own website.

Mine obviously isn't 'spruced' up, but a starry/snowflake version is lovely and festive too!

Starry clementine cake
Ingredients
75g butter
100g caster sugar
2 eggs
120g plain flour
1/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
85g fat-free greek yogurt
1 1/2tsp vanilla extract
zest of 1 clementine

Method

- Preheat the oven to gas 4/180C. Grease your tin very well. I actually didn't grease mine at all - it's still very new and the non-stick seems to be working well so I chanced it. I think a spray would be easiest for greasing with as the shape is so intricate.

- Cream together the butter and sugar.

- Add the eggs, with a spoonful of the flour to stop it curdling.

- Add the remaining flour, bicarbonate of soda, yogurt, vanilla and clementine zest and stir well to combine.

- Pour/spoon into the mould and bake for 35-40 minutes until a cake tester comes out clean.

I was lucky that my cake didn't stick at all, and turned out beautifully. The thing that amazes me about this cake is that it rises at all - the flour is plain flour, and there is only 1/4tsp bicarbonate of soda in there, but I suppose that's all that is needed in combination with the acidic yogurt.

Rudolph is getting all over the place isn't he! This is a truly delicious cake - really moist, buttery and slightly dense, but in the best possible way. The clementine flavour was slightly subtle, but definitely there, really delicious. I can understand why Nigella recommends this toasted and buttered for breakfast on Christmas day - a true Christmas treat, and I think Nigella would approve of my addition of clementine zest to add a little more Christmas zing to this delectable treat!

Orange and Cranberry Stollen Bars

I don't often bake things that I cannot eat (for obvious reasons of greed!) but J loves marzipan, Stollen is a very festive and seasonal bake and I was intrigued by this recipe (it's the second one down), recently published by Dan Lepard on the Guardian website. I had previously thought that Stollen was always a yeasted treat, but this was a non-yeasted version of Stollen. I have made a more traditional version (also to a Dan Lepard recipe) in the past, and you can see it here. I was interested to see how this one turned out and how it was received, given that rich, fruited, spiced, buttery eggy doughs take an age to rise, especially in my chilly kitchen.

As I've been browsing all the Christmas goodies popping up on people's blogs recently, I noticed that Jules over at Butcher, Baker had made a Stollen and she notes that both yeasted and non-yeasted versions are widely made in Germany, with a yeasted version probably being more traditional.

I followed the recipe fairly closely, but made one fairly major change. I didn't have pistachios and when I went to buy them found that they are horrendously expensive. I'm sure this will not come as a surprise to the nut-eaters of you out there, but as someone who never looks at nuts I was horrified at the price I was going to have to pay, and (rather selfishly) more so because I'd never get to enjoy these bars or note the difference that the pistachios made to it. So apologies Dan, I substitued dried cranberries for the pistachios - totally different texture and flavour, but cost an awful lot less! I did however, splash out on some better quality marzipan. If you read the packets of supermarket marzipan most of them only contain around 25% almonds, but the Anthon Berg brand (bright pink/purple packet in the UK) contains 60% almonds - big difference!

I needed to cook these for much longer than 30 minutes. I think it was nearer to 50 minutes, and may even have been a little longer. I used a fairly shallow 8" square tin, so I'm not sure what, if anything I did wrong, but they definitely weren't done at 30 mins.

I made these for a staff lunch at work where we all brought something in, and these were really popular, with people commenting on how nice they were, which is very gratifying. I also sent a piece to my chief taste tester, J, and thanks to Royal Mail it arrived in one piece. She absolutely loved it, and so all of my taste notes are thanks to J.

The stollen is really moist and almondy - no doubt due to the ground almonds in the dough and the chunks of marzipan spread throughout. J thought this better than having one long chunk of marzipan down the centre, but I think that perhaps the marzipan had become a little lost from her description. However, she said that the orange flavour was subtle, and it was moister than a traditional stollen, which is what I had expected. The texture is like a very enriched bread dough, but without the problems those doughs tend to have of not rising very well in my cold kitchen - probably a more forgiving stollen to bake. I think, all in all, that she loved it, and was possibly disappointed that only one piece found its way to her in the post!

Review: The Great British Bake Off - How to Bake.....

When the Great British Bake-Off was on the BBC last year, I really enjoyed watching the contestants progress through the rounds, seeing what they would come up with for the various different challenges, and seeing how they all interpreted the 'technical challenge' recipes set by Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood. I can't say I've baked many of either Mary or Paul's recipes, not owning any books by them. Quite a few of the recipes from the first series are available here, on the BBC Food website. The new series starts on Tuesday 16th August, 8-9pm, BBC2. There will be 11 episodes and I'm looking forward to it!

I'm sure you can probably guess where this is leading... I was recently contacted by someone from Random House, the publishers who are behind the book that accompanies the new series of the Great British Bake Off to see if I would like to review the book. Now I didn't immediately jump at this offer, because I wasn't sure if the book would contain anything new or indeed, anything I wanted to bake, but after a delay and some umming and ahhing I decided to accept their offer. A book speedily arrived.

Disclaimer: Clearly, this is a publicity exercise for the book, and I received my copy free of charge. However, I have not been paid to write this review, and the opinions contained are my own - good or bad.

The book is laid out in chapters, presumably according to the order of the challenges that the participants will undertake in the TV series; Cakes, Biscuits and Teatime Treats, Bread, Pies and Savoury pastry, Tarts and Sweet Pastry, Patisserie, Puddings and Desserts and finally, Celebration Cakes. The recipes are predominantly by Linda Collister, with some of the technical challenge recipes (7 in total) by Mary Berry or Paul Hollywood, with some 'Best of the Bake Off' recipes in each chapter which are the contestant's own. I really like Linda Collister's baking, from another book that I already own by her, which swayed me to accepting this offer. And although initially dubious I'm glad I did.

The book is well laid out, and beautifully photographed and although some of the recipes don't have corresponding photos there are some very indepth step by step recipe photographs, for the 'How to Make the Perfect....' (one of these in most chapters) and the technical challenge recipes, which is a good idea. I appreciate photos of what I'm aiming for, being more of the inspired by photos than intimidated by them school of thought.

As I went through the book I was glad I'd accepted the offer because there are quite a few recipes that I wanted to bake straightaway, and more that I would like to bake when I have more time or want to challenge myself with something new (pastry and patisserie chapters, I'm thinking of you!). Some of the particularly delicious sounding recipes (well, to my mind anyway) are Rhubarb and Custard Cupcakes, Brandy Snaps, Sticky Maple-Apple Traybake, Monkey Bread, Stilton, Potato and Caramelised Onion Pie, Chocolate, Fennel and Ginger tarts and Chocolate Fudge Hot-Pot Pudding but there are many more calling out my name. I have lots of baking books but I really could spend a long time just baking from this one!

So what did I decide to make to start? I chose Stem Ginger Shortbread, Sticky Orange Marmalade Cake, and Chocolate Velvet Cup Cakes with Chocolate Fudge Frosting.

The stem ginger shortbread was lovely and easy to make, and eat. Perhaps not as crumbly as some I have made before, not my best, but a lovely basic recipe all the same. The sticky orange marmalade cake was lovely - again easy to make (are you seeing a theme emerging here!) but it looked really lovely and showed off my lovely homemade orange marmalade off to good effect. The only slight problem I had with it was that it sunk slightly when it cooled and had overbrowned slightly in the oven. I removed the very top layer of over-browning because the marmalade glaze on the cake and the icing would hide the top of the cake, but I found myself berating myself for not managing to make it perfectly and imagining what Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood would have said had my cake been up for judging. I'm sure that the dip in the middle wouldn't have gone down well, but I think they would have been pleased with the final taste and texture!

My favourite was the chocolate velvet cup cakes with chocolate fudge frosting. These can be found right at the back of the book, in the celebration cakes chapter, and it would be a shame to miss them, because they're delicious!

Chocolate Velvet Cup Cakes with Chocolate Fudge Frosting (reproduced with permission)
Ingredients
175ml semi-skimmed or full-fat milk (I used semi-skimmed aka 2%)
100g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids)
125g caster sugar
60g unsalted butter, softened
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large free-range egg, at room temperature, beaten
150g self raising flour, sifted

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4. Pour the milk into a small, heavy-based pan (preferably non-stick). Chop the chocolate and add to the milk with one-third of the sugar. Set over the lowest possible heat and leave until melted and smooth, stirring frequently. Remove from the heat. If necessary, give the liquid a quick whisk to amalgamate, then set aside until needed.

- Put the butter into a mixing bowl and beat until creamy with a wooden spoon or an electric mixer. Add the rest of the sugar and the vanilla and beat thoroughly for about 4 minutes or until the mixture is very light and fluffy.

- Gradually add the egg, beating well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl from time to time. Using a large metal spoon fold in the flour in 3 batches alternatley with the chocolate liquid. When completely amalgamated spoon the mixture into the paper casess so they are evenly filled.

- Bake for 15-18 minutes or until the cakes are well risen and spring back when gently pressed with a finger. Remove the tray from the oven and leave to cool for about 2 minutes, then transfer the cup cakes to a wire rack and leave to cool completely before icing.

Chocolate fudge frosting
Enough for 12 cupcakes
100g dark chocolate (70% cocoa solids), chopped or broken up
1 rounded tablespoon golden syrup
50g unsalted butter

- Put the chocolate, golden syrup and butter into a heatproof bowl. Set over a pan of steaming hot but not boiling water (don't let the base of the bowl touch the water) and melt gently, stirring frequently. As soon as the mixture is smooth remove the bowl from the pan and cool, stirring frequently.

- When very thick and on the point of setting, swirl the frosting on top of the cup cakes using a round-bladed knife. Quickly add any decorations and leave to set.

My notes:

- My chocolate mixture did look a bit grainy, but it seemed to work ok.

- I inadvertently added half of the sugar to the milk mixture (why can't I divide 125g by three and get 40g not 60g???) but just put the rest in with the butter and it was fine!

- They actually took 15 minutes to bake!!! Yay, I usually find my cakes need longer than stated!

- Don't worry that the batter is very runny. I sort of spoon/poured it into the cases feeling very dubious indeed with visions of flat pancakes coming out of the oven only to be greeted by the beauties in the pic below!

I love this chocolate fudge frosting! It was beautifully bitter (I used Green and Black's 72% cooking chocolate) to offset the smooth sweetness of the cakes.

- Don't be greedy like me, and increase the quantities by 50%, you'll have far too much to fit on the cakes!

- The frosting took about 2 hours at ambient temperature (about 20C here) to reach almost-setting point, and until then was pretty much liquid. Have faith, and patience and you'll be rewarded!

These were utterly delicious. The cake was soft and smooth, moist and sweet and was offset really well by the slightly bitter chocolate frosting. I think this will be my go-to recipe for chocolate cupcakes from now, with the added advantage of needing less butter and eggs than a standard recipe and tasting fabulous! I'll also try and remember to make the frosting too, I much, much prefer it to chocolate buttercream which I tend to find too sickly sweet.

And if you've managed to get all the way to the end of that.... I have been offered two copies of the book to give away to my readers, but because it's a heavy book I'm sorry that this is only open to UK readers. Apologies to all my international visitors. To have a chance to win a copy of this book;

1. Become a follower of Cake, Crumbs and Cooking, if you aren't already.
2. Leave me a comment and let me know what your baking nemesis is - does pastry make you pale? do your scones leave people speechless? and what is your absolute favourite thing to bake?

This will close at midnight on the 20th August and I'll pick the winners by random number generator. I'll then contact you by email so if your email isn't obvious on your blog/website, please leave it in your comment :-)

Chocolate orange cake

I like to think of this cake as an 'everyday cake', a snacking cake, something to be there in the cake tin for when the urge for a little something sweet strikes. There isn't a gooey rich icing or frosting, but that's what I mean by an everyday cake. The cake is good enough not to need any embellishment, it can stand on it's own merit.

This is an adaptation of a recipe in Linda Collister's Easy Baking. I've already made a version of this cake here and so I knew that it was delicious anyway, but this time, my adaptations of the recipe were slightly different. I wanted to use up some yogurt rather than creme fraiche, and I fancied orange as the flavour - chocolate and orange are a match made in heaven (along with chocolate and mint). I also used some 90% cocoa solids chocolate that I had hanging around - it seemed too bitter to eat on its own (although I haven't tried this yet) and so a cake seemed like the perfect opportunity to allow its cocoa flavour to shine through.

Ah, the ubiquitous brown square - or, how many angles can you take a photo of brown squares from?!?

Moist chocolate orange cake
Ingredients
60g dark chocolate, melted (I used 90% cocoa solids)
120g soft butter
170g light muscovado sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 large egg
220g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
20g cocoa powder
120g yogurt (I used full fat Yeo Valley)

Zest and juice of one large orange

Method

- Preheat the oven to 180C/Gas 4. Grease and line an 8"/20cm deep square cake tin.

- Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

- Add the melted, cooled, chocolate and mix to combine.

- Add the egg, flour, vanilla, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, cocoa powder and yogurt and mix well, until all is combined and no traces of flour remain.

- The mixture seemed very stiff at this point so I added the juice of the zested orange and mixed well to make the mixture slacker.

- Spoon into the tin and level.

- Bake for 40-50 minutes until just firm. (The original recipe specified 25-30 minutes, but at this point my cake was still extremely wobbly and nowhere near done.)

- Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin before turning out.

- Cut into 16 squares.



Just as delicious as I remembered from last time, but more delicate and crumbly than I remembered. It was an extremely moist cake, and very delicate indeed - it fell apart as I picked it up to eat! The flavour was lovely though - really orange-y. I'm not sure about the texture of the zest in there though, I used a microplane grater (coarse) to grate the zest and next time I think I'll use something finer. But that was my only minor niggle, and colleagues thought it was lovely!

Citrus Olive Oil Cake (Dairy free)

Although I read lots and lots of different blogs, there are some that I find myself coming back to time and time again. The recipes are appealing and it seems as though I'm on the same wavelength as the author of the blog. One of these lovely blogs is Mainly Baking, written by Suelle. I think that part of the reason is that we both enjoy Dan Lepard's baking recipes from the Guardian newspaper, but there are lots of other recipes that Suelle posts that I find myself thinking I'd really like to try. She has recently had to change her style of baking for health reasons and has been doing a lot of low-saturated-fat baking (note: not necessarily low fat, but low saturated fat). I've been so impressed by the range of baked goods that use oil instead of butter and they all look just as delicious as those made with butter! It's always good to know that there's an alternative to butter laden cakes, and Suelle is building up quite a collection of tried and tested ones. I also really appreciate the honesty that she reviews her recipes with - if it's not quite right or there are receommended changes to a recipe I'd rather know before starting!

This recipe is based on a Mark Hix recipe, found in the Independent newspaper quite a number of years ago now. I followed the recipe as given (using all flour as stated, rather than Suelle's adaptation of cornmeal), apart from using the zest of a lemon and just the juice of the orange (it had already had it's zest taken for something else!). I baked it in an 8" square tin and found that it didn't sink at all on baking or cooling. I'm fairly sure it took longer than 45 minutes though, probably about an hour, and at that stage it was still perfectly moist and hadn't overbrowned on the top. The other change I made (and the one that renders this cake dairy free) was a simple substitution of rice milk for the milk specified in the recipe. I rarely drink milk and it's a pain to have to go and buy milk especially for recipes, so when I found I didn't have any dairy milk I opened a little carton of rice milk and used that instead. It's a fairly light flavour and so I don't think it either enhanced or detracted from the citrus and olive oil flavours in the cake.

I have avoided making cakes with oil as the main fat element for a while now, I think possibly because I sometimes think that muffins made with sunflower oil aren't as nice as those made with melted butter - there seems to be an aftertaste that I don't like, but perhaps this is just due to the sunflower oil and I should try a different oil instead. The other reason I haven't really made olive oil cakes before is that I had always assumed that the cost would be prohibitive. I was surprised though, that this was probably cheaper than a similar cake made with butter. I managed to buy 500ml of extra virgin olive oil (not single estate or anything amazing, but perfectly acceptable) for £1.74 on half price offer. 250g of butter is now at least £1.10, and that's for a supermarket's 'basics' range. Most seem to be around £1.30-£1.50, which is massively expensive. I'm sure that about five years ago butter was about 60-80p for 250g, and that wasn't even basics ranges! So I shall be looking at olive oil cake recipes more closely from now on!

I really, really enjoyed this cake. The flavour of the olive oil wasn't overpowering, but there was a definite 'something' extra to the flavour. The citrus and oil were well balanced, but if anything, I would add the extra grated rind that I missed out to enhance the citrus flavours more next time because the citrus didn't quite come through strongly enough for me, which is entirely my own fault! The cake wasn't oily, but was beautifully moist and close textured, and I can imagine it marrying perfectly with soft summer fruits. I'm glad that I've got a couple more pieces in the freezer to enjoy at a future date!